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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, first of all, let me congratulate Senator Brown and Senator Casey and all the work they put into this effort and Chairman Wyden for his negotiation to where we are right now.

This is a big deal for Rhode Island. We actually tried the child tax credit during COVID. We know how it works. It helped 174,000 Rhode Island families through COVID, and what we saw is that it lifted many of them out of poverty, and what else we saw is that it enabled parents to get into the workforce.

There is a phony narrative that if you give the child tax credit to families, they will just avoid work. Our experience was the opposite. Once you had child tax credit revenues and you could afford, for instance, childcare for your kid, then you could go to work. And, of course, we needed a workforce through COVID, so people were paying attention to this, and that was our experience. This is a pro-child and pro-work tax credit.

Now, you think it would be an easy slam dunk over here because it came through the House with a big bipartisan vote and the corporate benefits included in this bill far exceed the family benefits included in this bill. So you would think our Republican friends who are all about corporate tax benefits would be saying, hey, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, whatever the ratio is, we won this one big, let's close the deal; I support this even though it is a little bit out of balance. The Budget Committee did the work that showed the imbalance problem. We can always go back and solve the balance problem later. Families can't wait for the child tax credit. This really matters.

I support this deal, and I also support having a memory as we go forward and as we further decorrupt our Tax Code about how to bring that better into balance. It ain't forever. The child tax credit is the key here. I will only add that the low-income housing tax credit that is in here as well is extremely important. It is very important to Rhode Island. We have a housing crisis in Rhode Island. We have exactly zero of our municipalities left in which it is affordable for the average family to be able to own a home. And we have one--one--in which it is affordable to be able to rent a home.

So we have a lot of work to do, and the low-income housing tax credit is a huge lift that allows our very experts and very able housing community to build more and revamp more and produce more housing to meet the needs and quell the crisis.

So I will close by thanking Chairman Wyden for his leadership and his skilled negotiations that have gotten us to this point. And I hope that common sense, what is good for children, what is good for work, and what is good for the corporate sector can prevail here in the Senate.

(Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)

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